Not that the Financial Services Authority, which is being dissolved, covered itself in glory during the financial crisis. The FSA failed to notice London’s banking system was in a parlous state until it threatened to collapse into catastrophe. As an overseer of financial probity and stability, the FSA was worse than useless.

But, and here’s the extraordinary bit, a significant proportion of blame for leading the U.K. to the brink of ruin, and some would say a fair way over the edge, rests with none other than the Bank of England.

Between when it was granted independence in 1997 and the onset of the financial crisis in 2007, the BOE did nothing to halt the biggest accumulation of private and financial-sector debt as a proportion of domestic output ever, in any major economy. During that period, the U.K.’s private and public-sector debt, relative to the size of its economy, nearly doubled to become the highest combined ratio in the developed world, according to a recent McKinsey study. The vast bulk of that increase was accounted for by the financial sector and households. Indeed, between 1997 and 2007, government debt actually shrank as a percentage of GDP.

These were the years when members of the BOE’s Monetary Policy Committee gave speech after speech justifying the biggest housing bubble in British history. This bubble, which was being fuelled by a massive boom in leverage, including absurdities like 125% mortgages, wasn’t a bubble, the BOE’s wise men and women argued, but rather a perfectly rational price response to a brave new world of low risk ushered in by an enlightened and independent central bank.

Although he was referring to Federal Reserve chairmen Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research could just as easily have been citing Bank of England governor Mervyn King when he wrote that they were responsible for “one of the most astounding acts of economic incompetence of the last century.”